Heritage Makers Reunion

I've just returned from the Heritage Makers annual convention held in Las Vegas, Nevada. WOW!! I'm re-energized and very excited about the new things happening at HM. They have hired new designers and I'm looking forward to some great new templates in the template gallery. In my humble opinion, things are starting to look really great at HM. This translates into nicer products and faster creation times for books. After all, when you start with a great template, putting a book together is fast AND simple.

HM is also introducing new products and incentives. In addition, a new website design will be up and running in October. I can't wait! This is a forward thinking company and a trend setter in the digital scrapbooking industry. I expect to see many great new ideas and products from them in the coming months and years.

Welcome to my Etsy shop!

I've opened a shop!
Copy and paste this link to your browser to see one of a kind, hand painted glassware and ceramics.

www.cikeenan.etsy.com

A Change in Artistic Direction

It's been awhile since I posted to my blog and I apologize. I'm shaking things up a little and exploring new territory. As many of you have already found out, I am helping others create artwork on ceramics and am developing my own line of hand painted glassware and ceramics. My work is for sale in the Tampa area at Cupcake! Cupcakes in Westchase.

This is a big new undertaking for me, and I appreciate your patience while I get everything up and going. Presently, I'm working on some custom designs for baby birth commemorative plates, wedding "sign in" platters, signature photo image plates and celebration plates. My glasswork is very free form and can be designed around your theme. The martini and margarita glasses are on display at Cupcake! Cupcakes and I hope to have photographs of everything posted here very soon.

I will continue my work as a Heritage Makers consultant and would love to continue my work designing custom photo albums. This new venture with glassware and ceramics is just another extension of my passion for art in all its forms.

Please contact me if you have any thoughts on themes and ideas for specialty glasses and plates. I'd love to create special holiday gifts for your loved ones.

Young Authors Contest

Heritage Makers is sponsoring a contest this summer and I want to help. If you know a teenager who would like to write a book about themselves, we are going to meet once a week throughout the summer. I'll show them how to design a book from start to finish. They can use their own photos, drawings and words to create a one of a kind book that shows the world from their own unique perspective. Classes will be about an hour in length and will cost just $5 - 10, depending on the number of participants. If you'd like more information about the contest, click on the link in the left hand column. E-mail me if you'd like more information about my classes. cikeenan@verizon.net.

My latest watercolor

The painting is actually a bit larger than this... I uploaded it using my scanner... I will take a proper photograph soon so that I can have prints made. This was inspired by a painting I saw in Anne Abbgott's Daring Color. This book re-ignited my passion for watercolor. I'm already starting on another!

You're Invited!

You've scanned your photos... Now What???

Last week, I spent some time with my new scanner and I was pretty amazed. I managed to scan over 1500 photos in a little over 2 hours. The scanner is lightning fast and so efficient.

Now that these photos are digitized, I have some great software that makes my life so much easier. It's called Shoebox and it's made exclusively for the Mac. But if you're PC user, don't stop reading! I understand that the product called ACDSee works very similarly.

My process is simple. I insert my disc with my photos on it into my computer drive. I then open Shoebox. Within Shoebox, I can see all my photos on the disc. Then, I just start tagging them. The way I scan my photos is by years. So for instance, I can open the folder on my disc titled "1995." From there I will see all the photos from that year. (I could have scanned by category or topic, but I choose to scan mainly by year.) Within that year, I start assigning tags. So, on one photo, I can tag it with as many categories as I choose. For an example, Let's take a photo from Brianna's birth.

I tagged this photo with "1995," "Brianna," "Nick," and "4th of July."

Now, I don't need to know where this photo is on my computer anymore. I can just go into Shoebox and type in one of my tagged categories. If I type, "4th of July," every photo I've ever taken on the 4th of July will appear. Ditto if I type in "Brianna," or "Nick," or so on. I hope you get my gist.

And while this is nice for my more recent photos, it's fantastic for the older ones. For example, my 25 year old niece is getting married next year. Most likely, we will do a video montage for her and her fiance. With Shoebox, it's quite easy. I can just type in "Theresa" and every picture that I own of Theresa appears on my screen. It also tells me where it's stored. What's even better, is that if the montage is to include every family member, I can type in all their names and I can find the photos of Theresa with anyone she's ever known! It's great fun to see what you've got on file... and never has it been faster to find photos! I just found this photo of Theresa and her great grandmother and posted it here within 2 minutes...


Before I scanned these photos, I couldn't have told you where this photo was. Either in an actual shoebox, a photo album I haven't opened in years, or a tupperware bin filled to the top with photos that my mother gave me. It might have taken me hours to find it... if I could even have found it at all.

Shoebox is great for all my photo needs. For scrapbooking, it's unbelievable. The same way I tag my photos, I tag my digital art supplies. So if I'm working on a layout, I can type in "swirl" or "frame" or whatever, and all my elements are right there for me to see. Invaluable!

I hope this posting helps and if you have further questions or I can help you in any way, please feel free to give me a call.

See me on April 21

Please join me at the Ave. Cellars in Westchase from 6-9 p.m. I will be showcasing my Heritage Maker products, scanning services and watercolor prints along with a few of my friends, who will also be offering some products. They will be selling Silpada Jewelry and Spotted Leopard Apparel. It promises to be a fun evening with great food and wine. Hope to see you there!

A Few Words About Long Term Photo Storage

In the course of researching the best way to save photos I have been scanning for myself and my clients, I have learned quite a few things that I thought I should pass on.

For instance, did you know that flash drives should only be used for the transport of data and that they are not meant for long term storage? Sounds basic, I know. But many people don't know that they are a magnetic media and as such, can be erased when exposed to a magnetic field. And while people may use flash drives with the intention of just transferring information from one computer to another, things come up, the flash drive gets put aside, and time passes without the actual transferring of the files.

I've also had a problem with discs that I've stored my old photos on. Has this ever happened to you? A few years ago, I cleaned up my hard drive and put all my photos on discs. A few months ago, I wanted to access one of those photos. I took the disc out of it's folder where it has been sitting for the past 3 years. But, you guessed it... I put it in the drive in my computer and it was unrecognizable. I haven't the slightest idea what may have happened, but those photos are gone. At the time I had saved the photos, I really didn't know the difference between one disc vs. another. But even then, there may not have been that many differences. Not so today!

Today I feel much more confident about storing my old photos. Because, as luck would have it, my best friend of over 30 years works for a media storage device company. As I researched these issues, she gave me invaluable advice. Her company sells Century Archival Discs. They are not available on the mass market yet, but they are considered the gold standard for professional photographers and videographers.

For detailed information and special pricing on these discs, contact me directly at 813.818.0091.

Save the Date! Art Opening at The Jacey Gallery on March 6

Friday, March 6, 2009 from 7-10 p.m
4802 Gunn Highway
(in the Land & Sea Market plaza)

It's the opening gala for the current art show at the Jacey Gallery. I will be showing several of my pieces, including my BRAND, NEW, NEVER BEFORE REVEALED :) painting! This painting took me a YEAR to complete and I have to say, it is the most ambitious work I have ever done. So much so, that when I was done, I wrapped up my brushes and tucked them away!! This painting sucked my creative watercolor energies right into it!! Who knows when I will paint again???

Seriously, I am very proud of this painting and I am happy to have this opportunity. If you can't make it on the 6th, the show will hang until the end of April. Let me know if you're planning on being at the opening or if you go to the show afterwards. And please tell anyone who is looking for a cheap date night!!

Get Cookin' with a New Product from Heritage Makers!

The New Heritage Makers Cookbook is here. And to celebrate, we are having a big preview sale!

For four days only, (Monday, February 23 – Thursday, February 26, 2009) you can get 4 cookbooks for $59.95. That’s $15 for each Cookbook! What a HUGE savings! Normal retail price for this product is $24.95. You save $39.00!

Have you seen our new cook book? It's awesome! Check out this flyer for more information:http://support.heritagemakers.com/comm/promo/2009/cookbook/CookbookPresale09Flyer.pdf

Cookbook features:
-21 pages and can go up to 50 pages ($1/page for extra pages).
-Spiral bound and the front cover is a trifold that folds out!
-Size is about 7.5"x9.5"(portrait style)
-There will be some great templates in the Heritage Makers template gallery starting March 3rd (these templates are 100% editable so you an put as many recipes or pictures as you want on a page)- or you can completely design your own! You can even enter your design into our cookbook design contest and win free books!



This offer is ONLY available through ME and for FOUR days only! This is a GREAT time to buy for MOTHER'S DAY gifts or to plan for FAMILY REUNION COOKBOOKS this summer!

This design was intended for cookbooks but you could use it for so much more! Not only a cookbook but a . . .
Day planner
Address book
A class year book-which is a great ideas since the front cover opens up triple the normal size and it provides blank space for year book signings!
I am sure the ideas are endless, please send me yours!

EVERYONE will love them and they are SOOOOOO affordable! ORDER NOW! Contact me today and I'll help you get started.

Organizing Your Photos

As promised in my monthly Heritage Makers e-mail message, I will start sharing my process for organizing my old photographs. My goal is to sort and scan all my old photos -- not just of me and Brian and the kids -- but going back into my childhood and my parents lives before I came to be, as well. It's an ambitious project, but I'm pretty confident that if I just keep plugging away at it, it will all get done. Hopefully before the end of the year!

The first thing I've done is to gather all my photos into one place. For me, it's Brian's office. Sorry, honey! I've got my shoe boxes filled with old photos, old scrapbooks, old magnetic albums, the kids school files from over the years... you name it, it's all in this room. For me, I can't begin to organize until I have a full scope of the project. I'm sure I'll find other photos tucked away in odd drawers over time, but for now, I'm putting everything I know I've got into one room.

From there, I'm taking each item, piece by piece. I started with my old albums. Most are already chronological in order, so this was an easy way to begin. I'm taking each photo out of it's sleeve and putting it in a pile according to the year it was taken. I have little post-its to mark each pile with the year. I'm methodically doing this with all of the albums. When I get a bit bored, I go back into each "year" pile and start sorting by month. I'm not trying to be perfect, and as the kids have gotten older, the exact months don't matter quite as much as they did when they were babies and were growing so quickly. But I am trying to get as close as possible. Even if I break a year down into quarters, I'm doing pretty good at narrowing the photos down to their perspective places in history.

When I'm done with the albums, I'll start in on the shoe boxes. I've organized my photos in so many different ways over the years, that in my shoe boxes, my photos tend to be organized by categories, like "vacations," "Christmas," "Cousins," etc. I'll take the photos out of the boxes and start adding them to the "year" piles I've started. I'm not so worried about the categories right now, because once they are all scanned into my computer by date, I can tag them with categories.

As I'm going through my photos, there are certainly those that I'm not quite sure what year, let alone month, they were taken. I'm putting them to the side for now. I'm finding that as I go, I come across a photo that has already been marked with a date and I know that I can connect it to one of the photos in my "unknown" pile. At the end, I'm hoping this "unknown" pile shrinks down and I can then spend the time to ask other people if they happen to know when some of these photos were taken.

All the time I'm doing this, I'm getting rid of dead weight. You know what I'm talking about. Those pictures that we hold onto for no apparent reason. The blurry ones. The duplicates. The ones that make you look bad and hate looking at anyways! Now is the time to file them in the trash can and never look back. It can be tough to let go of some of them, but trust me, you'll feel better when you do!

That's about where I am right now in my own process. When I'm bored with it, I sometimes switch to organizing my digital photos on my computer. I'll save how I'm doing that for a future post.

Mark Your Calendars for March 6

That's the date of the opening reception for a new art display at the Jacey Gallery. I will have my latest painting there, being shown for the very first time. (It's the third one in from the left on the postcard.) It took me a year to paint and I'm so happy that it's done!! I've hung up my paintbrushes for awhile, so this will be my last gallery show until who knows when? I hope you can join me at the opening. Please post a comment here if you plan on attending.